Marriott International Data Breach Nisha Radhakrishnan

In today's technological era, a considerably large section of companies within the various industry segments is prone to the breach of data, which is nothing but the unauthorized use of a company or a user's information, which is confidential. A data breach, unstable integration, and hacking of a user's account are profoundly impacted security concerns that affect a wide variety of companies, be it small and medium businesses or large enterprises. Companies need to implement a variety of security measures in order.

As many industries are moving into the cloud, there is a grave concern and impact when it comes to the security and privacy concern of using this platform. Primarily most of the platform is handled by a third party. Hence, the users and businesses would not have direct control and management of information that is in the cloud. Due to this reason, a wide variety of industries face issues of their information being used by an unauthorized person without the business's knowledge or consent.

Get quality help now

Doctor Jennifer

Verified writer

Proficient in: Radhakrishnan

5 (893)

“ Thank you so much for accepting my assignment the night before it was due. I look forward to working with you moving forward ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

Another reason that leads to a situation like data breach is having two systems in the cloud managed by two different service providers. When two or more platforms and networks have instability in their connection, communication, and integration, the systems are highly prone to security and data issues. The issue of loss and attack on data can have an impact on not just the small and medium businesses but also the large industries and enterprises.

One of the largest leading international hotel chains like Marriott, has also been hit and vulnerable to the loss of data.

Marriott has several franchisees all around the world. Several of the franchises happen due to the mergers between various other companies that are in the same industry as Marriott. The mergers and alliances that occur between companies and businesses can lead to instability in the connection between the information. Marriott was impacted and hit by the loss of data in the year 2018 and the year 2020. In the year 2018, Marriott international had a massive impact due to the loss of illegal access to information of around 500 million guests whose registration information was in the database of Starwood, which is one of the franchisees of Marriott. ('Marriott International announces Starwood guest reservation database security incident.', 2018). Marriott International has revealed information that around 5.2 billion guests faced the vulnerability of having information revealed. The data accessed included their contact information, preferences, personal data has the loyalty affiliations and other details ('Marriott International notifies guests of property system incident.', 2020). Marriott International was impacted twice due to a security threat. The first incident occurred due to third party database security issues. In the second incident, hackers had stolen user credentials, and this led to the loss of critical information such as personal information of various guests.

When a cloud system is prone to the loss of critical information, it leads to the loss of integrity and confidentiality towards such systems. A data breach or access of information by an unauthorized person can be of various types, and most of the highly targeted information that s prone to a data breach is the information of the users or business that is easily identifiable. The different types of a data breach include incidents that happen due to accidents, events that occur due to an intentional offense committed by an internal business user, and it can also occur due to the deliberate attack that occurred due to outside or external personnel. Apart from a data breach, various other classification of threats arises in cloud computing systems. These include errors that happen due to a person; API does not have the right connection creating integration issues and hacking of a user's account credentials and shared credentials.